Women from the Parsonage

Pastors' Daughters as Writers, Translators, Salonnières, and Educators

Cindy K. Renker, Susanne Bach, Cindy K. Renker, Susanne Bach

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783110587517
• eBook ISBN: 9783110587623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume provides a new context for women's writing from the seventeenth through the end of the nineteenth century, highlighting the significant role of the parsonage and the parson himself for women's education in those centuries. Cindy K. Renker and Susanne Bach's collection of essays is the first of its kind on the education, lives, and works of highly accomplished daughters of Protestant clergymen. Since this volume only represents a limited number of women raised and educated in parsonages, it will surely encourage more investigation of other women writers, translators, educators, etc. with similar backgrounds. Moreover, since this book takes a comparative and transnational approach by focusing on different regions of Europe and different centuries. This collection of essays is thus aimed at scholars in multiple fields such as British literature, German studies, gender studies, the history of women's education, and social and cultural history.

About the Authors

Susanne Bach is professor of English Literature at the University of Kassel, Germany. Her research interests include 19th century novels, gender studies, psychoanalysis, 20th and 21st century drama and theatre. She is Research Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University, and has several times been Visiting Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Irene Collins was a historian and renowned scholar whose research focused, among many other topics, on Jane Austen and Napoleon. She was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Liverpool in 1947, where she remained until her retirement, serving as a reader in History and the first female Dean of the Faculty of Arts. She also served as vice president of the Jane Austen Society. The University of Winchester conferred on her the title of Honorary Fellow. She sadly passed away before the publication of this book.

Peter Damrau is a lecturer in German Studies at Birkbeck College / University of London. His main research areas are devotional literature of the 17th century and women’s writing of the 18th century. He is the author of the book The Reception of English Puritan Literature in Germany and he has published on other female writers such as Charlotte Lennox, Mary Collyer, Eliza Haywood and Sarah Fielding.

Renata Fuchs is a lecturer of German in the Department of Germanic Languages at UCLA. Her research areas include the Romantic era, contemporary German literature, German-Jewish literature, Holocaust studies, women’s studies, translation studies, and minority literatures. Her current project is of interdisciplinary nature and involves the fields of art, history, and literature and results in a collaborative effort of the UCLA Confucius Institute, Fowler Museum, Department of Germanic Languages, and Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, as she prepares a conceptual framework for the exhibit of Sandberg Siao’s (German-Jewish photographer) work at the Fowler and other museums. At present she is translating memoirs and a diary by Leon Najberg who survived the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto.

Pia K. Jakobsson is a clinical assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research interests are early modern British and European cultural and intellectual history, the public sphere, print culture, and gender studies. She is currently serving as Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies in the School of Arts & Humanities at UTD.

Valérie Leyh is associate professor for German Literature at the University of Namur, Belgium. Her research interests include 18th century literature, 19th and 20th century prose (especially Th. Storm and A. Schnitzler), literary networks and rumors as narrative strategy. She collaborated on an editing project from the University of Göttingen and was a visiting lecturer at the TU Dresden in 2016.

Gudrun Loster-Schneider is professor of German Literature with engagements at the Universities of Mannheim, Karlsruhe and Dresden. Her research and teaching interests include German Literatures from 18th to 20th centuries, gender studies and intersectional cultural studies. She is Founder Member and Fellow of the GenderConceptGroup at the TU Dresden and was Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, the University of Waterloo in Canada and the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Cornelia Niekus Moore is an Emeritus Dean of the University of Hawaii’s College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature, where she was also a longtime faculty member. Her research has concentrated on the reading and writing practices of women in Early Modern Germany, especially concerning devotional literature (The Maiden’s Mirror 1986) and the genre of the Lutheran funeral book as part of the development of biography in Early Modern Germany (Patterned Lives 2006). She has recently changed her focus from the devotional texts to the accompanying illustrations and the interaction between word and pictures.

Cindy K. Renker is a senior lecturer in German in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and a faculty fellow for the Jewish and Israeli Studies Program at the University of North Texas. She is also the German Program Coordinator. Her research interests are women’s writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly the lives and writings of pastors’ daughters. Her other research areas are Holocaust poetry and memory studies.

Vera Viehöver is professor of German Literature at the University of Liège, Belgium. Her research interests include 18th and 19th century life writing, in particular autobiographical writing by women and literary self-portraits of musicians, as well as theories of literary translation and contemporary German poetry.

Heide Wunder is a Professor Emeritus of the University of Kassel and a renowned historian of the history of rural society and gender history. Her research on women and gender, and historical anthropology, often involving sociological and cultural sciences and methods, thereby opening up new perspectives. In particular her monograph He is the Sun, she is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany (Munich, 1992, published in English translation in 1998) has been widely considered beyond the German-speaking world (including an English translation) and is regarded as a fundamental work on early-modern gender history.

Endnotes

1 In historical, literary, and gender-studies scholarship, the focus has been on the pastors’ wives and their duties rather than on the daughters. August Angermann’s treatise (for the German-speaking regions) is the only one that focuses on the daughters. See (Angermann and Quandt 1955). For an inside look at daughters of parsons in England see (Yamaguchi 2014).

2 Please note that with each century, the number of pastors’ daughters found among writing women increases, beginning with the second half of the eighteenth century and especially in the nineteenth century. See (Ramm 1998: 15). See also (Showalter 1978). Showalter emphasizes that many of the women writers presented in her book are daughters of clergymen. From the following two lexica, which list the parentage of accomplished women in the German-speaking regions, it becomes apparent how many pastors’ daughter are found among the women. See (Friedrich 1981) and (Woods and Fürstenwald 1984).

3 See (Yamaguchi 2014). See also my own study (Renker 2010).

4 From among the many biographies on the Brontës, the following biographies and monographs spend some time on the upbringing, parentage, and ed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• A Maiden’s Pastime: Susanna Elisabeth Zeidler (1657–1693)
• Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674–1737): From Parsonage to Bestselling Author
• Public Ambition as Moral Obligation: The Intellectual Career of Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806)
• Madame Necker (1737–1794): Educator, Salonnière, Mother, Writer, Charity Patron
• Dorothea Friderika Baldinger, née Gutbier (1743–1786): A “Woman Intellectual” in the Age of Enlightenment?
• Sophie Schwarz (1754–1789): “Wonderful Antagonism in My Own Soul” – Annotations to Sophie Schwarz’s Travel Journal
• Poetics, Politics, Gender and Pedagogics in Friederike Brun’s (1765–1835) Autobiography Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen (1824)
• Jane Austen (1775–1817): A Novelist from the Parsonage
• Louise Aston (1814–1871): A Liberal Author and Feminist
• “I will never have another man in this house”. The Perpetual Curate Patrick Brontë and His Perpetual Daughter Charlotte (1816–1855)
• About the Authors